New offering from one of the world’s fastest growing game developers enables any independent publisher the ability to brand their own high impact fantasy football game at no cost

LOS ANGELES, CA—(Marketwire – August 25, 2010)- RotoHog, one of the fastest-growing and most innovative fantasy sports and entertainment game operators and developers, today unveiled their latest product offering, a syndicated version of their award-winning, Fantasy Football Salary Cap game for independent publishers. The new game is first in a series of sports and entertainment games to be syndicated in the coming months.

As consumer content engagement continues to shift towards niche sites and games, RotoHog recognized the opportunity to extend its games-as-a-service model to deliver a turnkey solution for publishers who search for new ways to engage and monetize their audiences without the expense of licensing or managing a game themselves.

RotoHog has been developing and operating custom and configurable games for some of the world’s leading media and sports companies, and in so doing has developed a highly scaleable, sophisticated gaming platform. “We are excited to be offering an accessible gaming solution for an expanding market,” said Kelly Perdew, RotoHog CEO. “Our syndicated model will provide our associates an engaging, branded game experience and introduce new audiences to the quality of our games.”

The syndicated Fantasy Football Salary Cap game launches this week with SportsFanLive, the premier sports content and social network, dozens of independent bloggers, and Weplay, the leading online youth sports network participating.

Publishers that join the RotoHog’s Associate Program, will have access to personalization and marketing tools to co-brand the RotoHog games and share in the revenue generated by their audiences.

RotoHog is currently accepting applications and inquiries for their syndicated Football Salary Cap game. For more information go to http://bit.ly/clAVJ9 or email Associates@RotoHog.com.

Today, RotoHog hardly bears a resemblance to the fantasy sports website Kelly Perdew took the reins of in June 2008.

The Westchester company has recently made a name for itself as a creator of fantasy games for other businesses, including Sporting News, NASCAR and Us Weekly. But it was initially launched in 2006 as a stand-alone game site that could compete directly with fantasy sports giants like ESPN and Yahoo Sports.

The 43-year-old Perdew was brought on as the company’s new chief executive two years ago with one main objective: to make it profitable. His resume included running companies such as amateur sports website Eteamz.com, but he’s perhaps best known as the winner of season two of the NBC reality television show “The Apprentice.” He beat other contestants for the chance to work for Donald Trump under a 14-month contract.

Almost immediately after arriving at RotoHog, he put into motion a complete transformation of the company’s strategy.

“I don’t think a lot of people could have pulled it off,” said Kent Smetters, who co-founded the company with his partner David Wu. “Kelly evolved the model into a different kind of company.”

Rotohog.com went live in early 2007 offering fantasy leagues for the National Football League, Major League Baseball and other sports with a twist. To make the leagues more competitive and protect against bad trades among contestants, each player was valued in a unique stock exchange.

However, despite raising about $9 million, the site struggled for nearly two years. The problem? Perdew saw that bigger competitors such as ESPN had a captive audience by virtue of their news content, whereas at the end of the football or baseball season, RotoHog’s users left the site.

“They had spent a significant amount of money to drive eyeballs to the website,” Perdew said, “but there was no path to profitability.”

However, Perdew knew that ESPN and other competitors such as Fox Sports were running their games on older computer platforms that would likely need significant upgrades in a few years. He saw an opportunity for the company to reposition itself from a fantasy sports website to a games provider for other brands, moving from a consumer model to a business-to-business model.

“So I said, OK, we should become a platform that could basically replace their entire back end,” he recalled.

Not only that, Perdew moved for the company to expand its games beyond sports to broaden its appeal to other industries that want to use online games to interact with their customers.

After selling RotoHog’s board on the idea, Perdew had the company hunker down for a year while it developed a new Internet platform that could serve as the template for scores of websites.

Within the first three months, he had let go of 25 of the company’s 40 employees, many of whom had been hired to build content for a website that was no longer the focus. But the head count went back up to about 30 as he hired a new team of software developers.

“Don’t mention that time to any of the guys here,” he said, referring to the turmoil.

In September 2009, after more than a year of development, RotoHog launched its new platform. In the 9 months since, it’s developed 37 games for other companies, including those in the entertainment, consumer brands and gaming industries.

Online future

Among the games are one developed for ABC reality television show “The Bachelor,” which features trivia questions and gives out sponsored prizes, encouraging users to go back and watch old episodes online to get the answers. Another for Us Weekly allows fans to guess who will be featured in the magazine.

“I think more brands and more webites are looking at different ways to engage readers, and gaming for a certain demographic is interesting,” said Romina Rosado, executive producer of UsMagazine.com.

The company has also been working on a fantasy game on Facebook for newly launched Bloomberg Sports, which sells sports analysis to fans and fantasy players. The game will challenge users to pick successful hitters and will go live by the end of June.

Bill Squadron, the head of Bloomberg Sports, said the idea behind the game was to encourage users to buy the company’s baseball analytics for a leg up on the competition.

“Hopefully that’ll both let them know about it and drive sales of that product, and at the end of the day that’s the real goal we have,” he said. “You’re going to see a big number of major brands experimenting with this in different ways.”

RotoHog hasn’t yet reached profitability, but Perdew said the company is “this close.” Competitors such as Fanball also provide fantasy games for other companies, but Perdew claims no other providers cut across as many industries.

Another edge appears to be Perdew himself. He said the recognition from being on “The Apprentice” has helped the company get exposure through media coverage and speaking engagements. It’s even helped get meetings with potential investors.

“We’re pretty much able to get to anybody we need to talk to about stuff,” he said. “It’s a nice icebreaker for discussions. People are always asking me what’s up with Donald’s hair. I never answer that question.”

March is perhaps the most interesting time of year for sports and entertainment fans in general, as virtually every sport or area of entertainment is engaging its audience at some point. From the NFL Combine to the start of baseball, as well as March Madness, NASCAR and soccer in the sports world to the Academy Awards in entertainment, there is perhaps no busier or more exciting month on the calendar. For all of us at RotoHog, the levels of fan interest and engagement at this time of year are never higher, and all the projects we are now involved with are reflective of both what the consumers are looking for and where we have grown as a company in the sports and entertainment space. Here are some great examples of all the fan engagement areas we are touching in such a busy month:

BASEBALL. In baseball, spring training is now in full bloom, which means fantasy baseball is now upon us. Our crowd favorite Stock Exchange Baseball game is available for those of you that like to “play the market” and we have launched our first ever League Manager Fantasy Baseball game here: http://www.rotohog.com/corporate/baseball/ League Manager 2010 offers traditional commissioner style draft and trade products to the fantasy enthusiast at a reduced price and we also offer our first ever Salary Cap Baseball game on RotoHog. All games include cash competitions!

NASCAR. As NASCAR continues to rev around the country, our recently launched NASCAR Stock Exchange game is doing well on Turner’s NASCAR.com platform.

I’m proud to say our team has created, developed and launched 26 games on our new platform since the last football season.

ENTERTAINMENT. We continue our expansion into the entertainment vertical with the March 2nd launch of the Us Weekly Celebrity Fantasy League. The game challenges user knowledge of which celebs will be making or breaking news. To get in on the action, users create a team of 25 celebrities they think will be in the news the most during a given week. Each week players put 10 stars from their team that they think will make the magazine and be featured on UsMagazine.com on the Red Carpet, while the other 15 hang out in your Dressing Room.

Those are just the latest projects on top of all the other work we are doing building and implementing games and applications for our partners around the world. With all this great work and expansion across so many platforms, we have added some new members to our team, including Jeff Daniel, who recently joined us after helping ESPN and FOX Digital build their fantasy platforms. Jeff’s addition gives us another experienced leader who can help us continue to manage and expand all the work we are doing with such a wide array of partners.

As we have said in the past and it continues to be true, we are still just getting started. A recent piece in the Sports Business Journal pointed to the continued growth of casual gaming, an area in which we will be expanding over the next few months. The World Cup and other international events will provide us with some great opportunities to show the versatility of our platform, and we are looking forward to also expanding even more into the entertainment space. We have seen interest growing for games like we are running for Us Weekly and The Rose Ceremony game we just finished with our TV Network partner.

Yes, March is a very crowded and exciting month for the sports and entertainment fan, and we share that excitement from a business perspective. Our recent work has again shown that our model is working and growing, and we know that will continue with more exciting news and new partners in the coming months.

As always thanks for your time and support, and let us know what else we can do to assist you. Enjoy the games!

Approximately two months ago I sent along a first quarter “progress report” letter to keep everyone up to date with all the new developments at RotoHog, as we expanded our partnerships and secured the necessary additional funding we would need to take the business to a new level. At the end of the letter I mentioned that more good news was coming, and today I wanted to pass along the latest advances we have made in the business as we continue to make the company into the most innovative fantasy sports gaming developer for major brands and professional sports entities.

Our leadership position in this very competitive marketplace is expanding almost daily. Just in the last few weeks we have been able to announce:

• A landmark partnership with The Sporting News, where RotoHog will build, activate and market all online fantasy games for one of the most established online properties and storied names in sports and entertainment publishing. http://tinyurl.com/necqpo

• A partnership with Chris Russo and the folks at Fantasy Sports Ventures, the fastest-growing independent site on the web, to build games for FSV’s extensive list of sites and ever-evolving business partners, brands and sponsors. http://tinyurl.com/n2kkju

• A strategic partnership with online news and content provider Operation Sports to produce, manage and market their 2009 Stock Exchange Football Game. Operation Sports is a leading news and content provider focused on the sports video game industry with over 100,000 members. http://tinyurl.com/cszvzh

These new deals, in addition to our existing partnerships with the NBA, Turner Sports, FOX en Espanol, Pro Football Weekly, the AVP and others, give us the widest range of strategic partnerships to develop and build games in the industry today, and the best part is we are just beginning to establish our brand.

In the next few months we expect to continue to grow partnerships with additional media entities around the globe, as we shape RotoHog into the ultimate destination for brands who want to provide “best in class” and innovative gaming applications to their loyal subscribers ubiquitously on their sites, mobile, and social media channels.

Once again, we want to thank you for your support and interest, and as always, if there is anything we can help you with, please let us know.

Fantasy outfit RotoHog has struck a multiyear deal with Sporting News to power the media outlet’s suite of fantasy games.
Beginning with fantasy football this fall, Los Angeles-based RotoHog will develop and operate a set of free and fee-based fantasy games under the Sporting News brand for football, baseball, golf, hockey and motorsports. Of particular note is how the pact aims to extend Sporting News’ fantasy reach into social media and mobile networks, using technologies that allow assets from the games to be easily distributed from SportingNews.com onto platforms such as Facebook and the iPhone.

“In order to take our games to the next level, we wanted to align with somebody intensely focused on the space, was committed to a strong [business-to-business] solution, and wasn’t satisfied with developing the same old off-the-shelf products,” said Jeff Gerttula, vice president and general manager for online at Sporting News.

For RotoHog, the deal extends a run of activity this year that includes a somewhat similar deal with Fox Sports en Español, an alignment with ticketing outfit RazorGator, and the closing of a $2 million round of Series B venture capital funding. “This is a very strong testament to what we’re doing and the platform we’ve developed,” said Kelly Perdew, RotoHog chief executive. “We’re very excited to be partnering with an iconic brand like this and are pleased to be able to have good things like this happening in this economy.”